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(General ^itn0trong:'0 

Cift anb Work 

By 
Franklin Carter, Ph. D., LL. D. 



Bx-Pre^i(lcnt (>r\VilIinm<i Collcirc 




General ^Armstrong's 
Life and Work 



By 

Franklin Carter, Ph. D. , LL. D. 

Ex-Fresident of Williams College 



Founders Day oAddress, 1 902 



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AUG l»W 



Tie Press of 

The Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute 

Hampton, Virginia 

1911 




General Armstrong's Life and Work 

An address delivered January tivcnty-sixth, nineteen hundred and 
Huo, in Hampton Institute Memorial Church, by Franklin Carter, Ph D., 
LL.D., Ex-President of Williams College. 



NOTHING becomes more certain to one who believes that God is, 
than God's controlling grasp of human history. Indeed, to him 
who reads aright, there is no more convincing proof that God is, than 
is found in the study of human progress. The contemplation of an 
individual life is sometimes bewildering. Many a man with good pur- 
pose and self-denying aim is beaten down in the collision of forces that 
envelope him. But in modern days we nearly always wonder at the 
overwhelming of a good man and ask, "Why does God permit it.?" 
So we sometimes wonder at the disaster which befalls a nation or a 
race. But take a large enough view, and the destruction of Carthage, 
the prostration of Greece, the fall of Home, move into place as evidence 
that the world grows better, that God guides humanity to nobler 
visions and grander achievements. 



As we meet here this afternoon, our thoughts are invited to con- 
template both a race and a man — a weak race brought by cruel greed 
in fear and anguish to this continent, kept weak and denied intellec- 
ual progress, held in fetters by the power of an ever-growing and at 
last mighty government — a strong m.an who, coming up among a feeble 
folk, imbibed the love for humanity from his mother's breast, and, sail- 
ing to his father's country for education, gave his young, vigorous life 
to fight for the country of his fathers until that fight was won, and 
then took upon his heart and mind the weak and helpless race whose 
.fetters had been suddenly removed, making them through ignorance 
and degradation a menace to the well-being of the republic. Look at 
the cargoes of Africans moving westward year after year in the stifling 
holds of slow-sailing s h i p s, ^ _ 

dumped in chains upon the east- '' 
ern shore, multiplying in helpless 
dependence over all these beauti- 
ful valleys and plains. Does it 
not move you to ask, " Where is 
God V Wait, my friends. By and 
by, from an island in the western 
ocean, a swifter ship shall sail 
eastward with a young man on 
board, of large powers, but almost 
without purpose save that he will 
follow his Master, Christ, wher- 
ever He leads, who shall be trained 
in college and war to lift this peo- 
ple into useful service ; who shall 
be the great pioneer in transform- 
ing the misdirected instincts of a 
debilitated race into the fine, free, 
organic powers of American citi- 
zens. We can never forget the 
sufferings and sorrows of those 
helpless ones through the long years of a century and a half. Nor 
can we forget the anxieties and fears and the heart-searchings as to 
duty of those among whom they lived. The faithful record of that 
history we leave with God, and praise Him that when the day of 
deliverance came, the teacher, leader, helper, uplifter, also came. 

When the first missionaries sailed from Boston for the Sandwich 
Islands eighty years ago to begin the work of uplifting and redeeming 
the Hawaiian natives, not the wildest imagination could foresee that 
out of that movement and from one of those islands should come the 
force, the man, who would be to millions of helpless Negroes in our 
Southern country the uplifter into the thoughtful, loving, dili- 
gent apprehension of their own duties, into a gentle and rational pa- 




Samuel Chapman Armstrong at Twenty-one 



triotism . Love of the degraded natives of the Hawaiian Islands, stirred 
in New England breasts, was the original force that produced the 
heroic man, the Christian service, for which we thank God to-day. 




The Old School Hall of Oahii College, where General Armstrong was a Student 




General Armstrong's Birthplace on the Island of Maui, HI. 

" No act falls fruitless ; none can tell 
How vast its power may be ; 
Nor what results unfolded dwell 
Within it silently." 



I ask you to consider for a little while how admirably fitted 
Samuel Chapman Armstrong was for his great work. He was born, 
as I said, in the midst of a people who needed help, and to give help to 
whom his countrymen and his own father and mother had travelled 
thousands of miles. He knew from childhood the perils and sorrows 




Mark Hopkins. President of Williams College from 1836 to 1872 

of a degraded, ignorant race, and he knew also that there is no work 
so glorious as the uplifting of such a people. When he went to 
America for his education, he went to a college among whose students, 
nearly a hundred years ago, the greatest American movement for the 
redemption of the world was born. He imbibed, during his college 
course, something of the inspiration of that movement. He lived in 
the home of one who was and had been for many years the president 




The President's House at Williamstown where General Armstrong lived while in College 

of that great missionary society. He was taught by Mark Hopkins 
the sublime philosophy of Christianity, and that means the rescue of 
the lost. He learned from Albert Hopkins, on whose window 
in our chapel are the words, " They that turn many to righteousness 
shall shine as the stars forever and ever," as he never knew it before, 
the majesty of Christian loving and living. He did with his might in 
college what his hands found to do. I remember that when describ- 




The old Plantation " Mansion House"' which was (General Armstrong's Hampton Home 



ing fencing with him for exercise, his chum told me that the intense 
keenness of his eye and the swift plunge of the foil, sometimes terri- 
fied him. He thought that Armstrong would actually run him through. 
He was physically sound and strong. I have heard him say since his 
graduation that he was glad there was no such ama,zingly developed 
system of athletics in college in his day as now exists. He could not 
understand such an amount of money and force devoted to a subor- 
dinate purpose in college. I thought as I hstened to him saying this : 
" Ah, my friend, if you were in college now, you would yield to no 
man in vigor of tackling on the foot-ball field, or in the swiftness and 
precision with which the baseball would be hurled to put a man out on 
third base ! " His athletic prowess would have given him renown and 
that would have added scope to his moral power. Yet the play of 
college life would have remained play to him. He was intense. I 
think of Von Moltke, the great Prussian general, in the dawn of a 
summer day of 1870, riding over a plain in eastern France from which 
the Jura range was visible and planning for the next movement. His 
young aid-de-camp, enraptured by the beauty of the scene, calls the 
old general's attention to the mountains glorified by the advancing 
color of the rising sun. The great general turns and says severely, 
" Do not speak to me of your private affairs." Armstrong might 
have said that, but the moment it was said he would have seen the 
fun of it. But he was always dead in earnest. 

He went into the service of his country. This was his country, 
though he was born in a distant island of the sea, for it was his father's 
country and his love of it and service for it early won him citizenship. 
Now he is glad that those islands, as they were not in his boyhood, are 
a territory of the country he loved and for which he lived and died. In 
the war he learned to control men, and that means that his insight was 
quickened, his patience was enlarged, his judgment of men made com- 
prehensive, and his swift resort to wise measures in emergency became 
a habit. It does not mean that he for a moment lost one atom of his 
hatred of meanness or of his love for righteousness or his love for 
humanity. What a series of promotions his war record was ! In nearly 
every important movement from the beginning to the end he had a 
part, and he learned to love the black race in his two years' command 
of Negroes. When the war was over and the Southern people lay ex- 
hausted and quivering with pain and bewildered by their relations to 
the freed slaves, the Northern people, chastened by the desperate 
struggle and the desolation of their households, in the nobility of their 
love for the colored people, gave to them, when they could not well 
use it, the right of suffrage. Assigned to duty in this region by the 
Freedmen's Bureau for the care of ten counties, having studied the 
condition of the race and long since perceived that education of head 
and hand and heart — the development of character — could alone save 
this enfeebled people from misery and crime. General Armstrong said 
to himself : "I will found a school to educate teachers for this race. 
I will begin in a humble way a more patriotic, more difficult work than 




fighting for my country. I will open 
the door for this people, whom I dear- 
ly love, into intelligence, self-control, 
manhood, and womanhood, and send 
my pupils over all this Southern land 
to be centers of light and love, ex- 
amples of diligence and loyalty to the 
noblest motives." Being thus trained 
by God it is not too much to say that 
he was inspired of God. His early 
visions of this service, his heroic re- 
solve, his single-minded consecration, 
his undaunted advance over obstacles 
— these were because God was in 
him, guiding and inspiring more and 
more visibly to the end. 

In the fragmentary notes left by 
the great Lincoln of the memorable 
conflict between himself and Douglas 
in Illinois in the autumn of 1858, are 



found these words : " Suppose it 
is true that the Negro is inferior to 
the white man in the gifts of Na- 
ture, is it not the exact reverse of 
justice that the white man should, 
for that reason, take from the Ne- 
gro any part of that little which 
he has had given him }" These are 
manly words, but what Armstrong- 
would have said, what he did say 
by his choice of life-work, was : "If 
it be true that the Negro is inferior 
to the white man in the gifts of 
Nature, it should be the high mis- 
sion and the supreme joy of the 
white man to help the Negro make 
the very utmost of what he has 
had given him." 

And then the site to be select- 
ed for the school. It was better 
that it be near enough the North 
to command and receive attention 
from Northern Christians, and yet 
it must be in the South, easy of ac- 
cess for those to be helped. So, 




10 



on the very shore on which the ancestors of this people had been 
dropped in chains, on soil of that state where for four long years the 
fiercest battles over the destiny of the Negro had been fought, a soil 
consecrated by the blood of thousands of Northern and Southern 
heroes, almost in sight of those waters where the deadly grapple of 
the huge Merrimac and the little Monitor occurred : on this soil shall 
they, over whom and for whom all this carnage really was, be taught 
the sweet reasonableness of the religion of Jesus Christ, the arts of in- 
dustry, and the true service of country. Here, not very far from where 
the first college in the Southern country, the second college in Ameri- 
ca; was planted (but only for the whites) shall be erected a normal 
school which shall go a little way towards healing the wounds that 
cruelties and war have inflicted, and towards making it possible for the 
whites and the blacks to live together in charity and peace. 

But he did not confine himself to the training of the Negroes. 
The passion for studying how to uplift a race got such hold of him that 
Indians were admitted in response to an application from one of their 
true friends. The problem of lifting must vary somewhat with the 
differing characteristics of different races, but, fascinated by these 
great problems, he saw that the presence of the two races in the same 
institution might stimulate the teachers and be of mutual benefit to 
the two races. All uplifting of a race, like every true redemption, 
must be made effective by quickening and guiding individual minds. 
Armstrong knew from his college days what that meant, and it stirs 
the blood to read the simple confession recorded in one of his papers, 
that whatever good teaching he had done was Mark Hopkins teaching 
through him— the teaching of a great teacher, judicious and symmetri- 
cal in character like the round circle which Everett applied to Wash- 
ington, the teaching of this great teacher handed down through him- 
self to God's little ones. 

Armstrong did not concern himself much with the surface of 
things ; he went straight to the heart of every problem. He was no 
dealer in fine phrases, no seeker after soft places, no lover of Lydian 
airs or delicate perfumes ; he was a man, an earnest, downright man ; 
and "the image of God cut in ebony," as an old writer calls it, was to 
him just as truly an image of God as the Phidian Zeus or the Venus 
of Melos. It was the divine that he cared for. For this reason the 
Negro was more attractive than the Greek, if he needed help. There- 
fore he was thus far fitted for this great work in which he must 
grapple with Southern prejudices ; bear patiently and sympathetically 
the criticisms and sneers of a high-tempered and just then naturally 
exasperated people ; appeal unceasingly to cold,calculating Northern- 
ers for aid ; bear courageously the stupidities and frivolities that 
slavery had begotten and, worse than all, the lapses and relapses that 
sudden liberty made inevitable. He aimed at broad results and if he 
was sure that those results were coming, the fashions and manners. 




Samuel Chapman Armstrong at Tliirty-tliree 

the sneers and criticisms of onlookers, nay, the trivialities and miscon- 
ceptions and ingratitudes of those for whom he was working, did not 
greatly disturb him. Nevertheless, what faith was required to be sure 
that the results were coming ! What a heroism, in those conditions, 
" to bate no jot of heart or hope but steer right onward " ! 

"Endurance is the crowning quality. 
And patience all the passion of great hearts ; 
These are their stay,- and when the leaden world 
Sets its hard face against their fateful thought. 
And brute strength, like a scornful conqueror. 
Clangs his huge mace down in the other scale. 
The inspired soul but flings his patience in. 
And slowly that outweighs the ponderous globe, — 
One faith against a whole earth's unbelief, 
One soul against the flesh of all mankind." 



12 



There was an inexhaustible fund of fun in Armstrong's mind. 
He saw the comica] side of every situation, and the humor of the sharp 
contrasts between the ideal and the real helped him on. In a letter 
written for his class report twenty years ago, in answer to the request 
to state what he had published, he said : " I have pubHshed nothing 
but a succession of howls for money for the Hampton School, to which 
the dear public have on the whole liberally responded, though, as in 
war, only one shot in five hundred hits." He loved literature and 
scholarship, but the idea that he could have any relation to these fine 
attainments in his absorbing work struck him as comical. Those who 
knew him well can almost hear him laugh as he wrote the words. The 
fun in him was indomitable. Neither frightful danger, nor colossal 
tasks, nor broken nerves, nor religious worship, could stop its flow. 




General Armstrong's Grave in the School Cemetery at Hampton 

Yet with all his vitality, his intense earnestness, his indifference to 
petty things, his fun,and his faith, God only knows the discouragements 
that his heroic soul encountered in the great work to which he gave 
his life. It is because God, to whom he uttered his appeals for help 
in this great work, knew of his struggles and disappointments and 
comforted him by the answers to his appeals, that we find in his post- 
humous papers the declaration that " Prayer is the greatest thing in 
the world." That, you know, is not what Drummond says. He says 
that "Love is the greatest thing in the world." But there will not be 
much prayer to God without love for Him and His will, and prayer 



13 

rests on the very foundation of God's love to us. So you see Aim- 
strong" and Drummond are not very far apart. Moreover, Armstrong's 
prayer was love — yet how he hated cant ! He was the last man to be 
willing to claim publicly that God had answered his prayer or that his 
love to his fellow-men was anything supereminent. 

You know, friends, that this great school whose privileges you 
enjoy has cost much, but you do not always realize it. It has cost much 
to many small and large givers in the North who gave of their hard- 
earned savings to the colored people and the Indians ; much to patient 
and gifted teachers. Nor should it be forgotten that no school in the 
North can present in its list of teachers a more distinguished roll of 
women than this institution. Armstrong knew instinctively a noble 
woman. He knew also how to attach and keep such in this great work. 
In this and in ways innumerable this school owes infinitely much to 
him who conceived the idea of establishing it here and for twenty-five 
years poured an irrepressible stream of his own life-blood into its daily 
ongoing and upbuilding, with joy indeed, but often with pain, until at 
last he had given all that blood, and fell a martyr to his loving zeal. 

My friends, I love to think of him, not rushing up and down 
before his moving lines in the hot battle, apparently swallowing bullets 
with the charmed life of a Napoleon ; not standing on a platform and 
painting for a Northern audience the sad picture of a race rapidly mul- 
tiplying, but likely to stumble, fall, rapidly die, because with so little 
inheritance of character, and arousing his hearers to a keen sympathy 
with the lofty but not unattainable aims of this school ; nor even in 
the loneliness and complete absorption of prayer to his Heavenly 
Father when he touched the lever that moves the world ; but teachins" 
humbly the slow-moving minds of his pupils the great principles of the 
law of love. I love to think of him, I say, teaching them to think, to 
get hold of the ideas of cause and effect, sin and punishment, forgive- 
ness and love, and then driving" home to them with the explosive, 
volcanic earnestness of the Irish temperament and with Saxon perti- 
nacity, the truth that work, steady, diligent work, was to be the cause 
of their progress, the deliverance for them from sin and misery, the 
sure sign that they were worthy of God's forgiveness and love. With 
that lofty carriage of the head, with that keen, penetrating flash of the 
eye, with that swift, jerky utterance (through it all the tenderest 
sympathy gleaming forth) standing before his students with their dark, 
pathetic faces he was more than general, more than orator, more than 
a victorious Israel, he was a fellow-worker with God, inspired, sublime. 

As the years went on, more and more he emphasized the iildus- 
trial side. More and more he saw that what the colored people need 
is not Greek culture of the head, not chiefly a knowledge of history 
and literature, but enough training of the brain to make them think 
well, control their lower desires, and love their fellow-men, but mainly 
industrial training, steadiness, and mastery of trades, loving, skillful 



SAMUEL CHAPMAN ARMSTRONG 

Born in Wailuku, Maui, Hawaiian Islands, January 30, 1839 
Graduated from Williams College, Mass., in the class of 1862 
Entered Union Army, August, 1862, as Captain in the 125th N. Y. 

Volunteers 
Took command of the 9th U. S. Colored Troops, fall of 1863 
Mustered out in Nov. 1865, as Brevet Brigadier-General of Volunteers 
Made officer of Freedmen's Bureau on Va. Peninsula, March, 1866 
Founded Hampton Institute for Negro youth, April, 1868 
Began work for Indians at Hampton Institute, 1878 
Received LL. D. from Williams, 1887 
Died May 11, 1893. 



Hampton Institute, the well-known school for Negroes 
and Indians, was founded by General Samuel Chapman Arm- 
strong in I 868, on the shore of Hampton Roads, near Fort 
Monroe, Virginia. 

It is an undenominational industrial school, controlled by 
a board of seventeen trustees. The school property includes 
1 1 00 acres of land and 135 buildings, among which are a 
church, academic hall, library, dormitories, and buildings for 
the teaching of agriculture and the mechanical trades. 

The number of students ( I 9 I 0— 1 9 1 1 ) is 1 399, of whom 
82 are Indians, and 524 are colored children in the Whittier 
Training School. The 875 boarding pupils pay for their 
board and clothing. This is partly provided for the Indians 
by the Government, but the Negroes provide their own, pay- 
ing their bills partly by labor at the school. But the great 
majority of students cannot pay their tuition, which is one 
hundred dollars per pupil. This is divided into an academic 
scholarship of seventy dollars, and an industrial one of thirty 
dollars. A permanent industrial scholarship can be endowed 
for eight hundred dollars and a permanent academic scholar- 
ship for two thousand dollars. 

Many Sunday-schools, associations, and friends of the 
two races are interested to give these scholarships, or larger 
or smaller sums, year by year according to their ability, and 
thus assist Hampton in raising the $125,000 necessary each 
year for current expenses in addition to its regular income. 
Sundaj'-school classes are also often interested in sending 
Christmas boxes to graduates who are teaching in the South 
or West. 

More than seven thousand young people have had the 
benefit of Hampton's ideals and training. They have for the 
most part gone back to the Western plains or to the Southern 
States and there have become centers of influence — teachers, 
farmers, skilled mechanics, thrifty home makers — leading 
their people more by deeds than by words to a higher plane 
of citizenship. 

Any subscription, however small, will be gratefully re- 
ceived and may be sent to F. K. Rogers, Treasurer, or to the 
undersigned, 

H. B. FRISSELL, Principal, Hampton, Va. 

FORM OF BEQUEST 
I give tind rJevise to the Trustees of the Hampton Normal nncl 

Agricultural Institute at Hampton, Virginia, the sum of 

dollars, payable, etc. 




606 5 



